Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 129 posts

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#111

Post by timelined »

graycat wrote: post #33

As I recall, there is microelectronics fab work in Taiwan, South Korea, and, in the US, at IBM and Intel, at least. And maybe China and Russia are trying to get caught up in fabs. I wonder: What organization, really, is mostly responsible for the newer fabs? I mean, do each of Samsung, Intel, IBM, etc. do everything on their own? Or is there a main company, maybe Applied Materials, with some help from, say, some smal…

IBM/Intel/Samsung buy tools from various companies. By "tools", I really mean huge pieces of instrumentation that cost many (tens to hundreds) millions of dollars from other companies that are used for the various processing steps (deposition/growth of materials on wafers, patterning resists, etching, etc). The development of each of these tools is immensely difficult and challenging and making them talk to each other and designing manufacturing pipelines is another immense challenge. IBM/Intel/Samsung's job is to design chips (a immense challenge on its own), come up with a process to manufacture them, and then take each of these very complex tools, integrate them into a manufacturing pipeline (with QC), and manufacture the devices that they want.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#113

Post by nicholas73 »

The press articles about this generally are misleading in that they use Silicon-Germanium as the catch phrase that's represents the breakthrough. Whereas in fact SiGe processes have been available for at least a decade. I know this because I developed chips for an IBM SiGe process a decade ago, and in college I did a research paper on semiconductor "superlattices" using an old textbook from our school library. It's not a new technology by any means.

IBM's 7nm is a great accomplishment for sure, but we really don't know anything about how it was made from the articles. Essentially SiGe is a bit more conductive and can switch faster than normal Si chips, thanks to quantum tunneling.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#114

Post by thoughtsimple »

QuantumRoar wrote: post #44
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's silicon-germanium (so still has silicon in it). I'm curious what comes after :)

III-V semiconductors like Gallium Arsenide have a high mobility and are probably tested right now in Research labs around the world for CMOS-transistors (it is already in use for something like solar panels). But there's always the problem of how to scale these things as well as silicon based manufacturing. Further out is still some stuff like graphene or carbon nanotubes. Of course, the structure of the transistor i…

IBM has some good news on III-V materials as well.

https://www.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/futuristic...

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#115

Post by Symmetry »

astrodust wrote: post #101
userbinator wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we've been wasting far too much processing power in inefficient software for the past few decades, and it's only Moore's Law that let it happen for so long. Now that it's coming to an end, maybe we'll see more emphasis on efficiently optimised software and mindful resource usage.

"Coming to an end"? The sky isn't falling yet. Just because they're having some trouble with one process doesn't mean the whole party is over. There are other materials to make chips out of besides silicon, gallium arsenide and carbon for instance, each of which has different scaling properties. There's also ways to make chips more dense by stacking wafers instead of trying to shrink features.

It can sometimes be comforting to know that the universe imposes fundamental limits on how how efficiently computation can be done. Comforting because IIRC we've still got at least 15 orders of magnitude improvement available. But while I'm sure you're right that we're going to be able to switch to different materials (or maybe away from transistors entirely) when progress in silicon runs out we might have to expect an interregnum while other computational substrates are developed to the point where they can provide higher performance.

Stacking is certainly a thing and it's good for memory (see AMD's newest graphics card) but power dissipation provides limits in terms of how much high speed logic you can put under a given area.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9266/amd-hbm-deep-dive

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#118

Post by minthd »

api wrote: post #99
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for comparison, scale fans, let's remember that we're talking about making 7nm features on wafers that are nearly a foot and a half wide, using near-as-dammit x-ray wavelengths. A few teething problems would be expected. 7nm has been struggling for a while, 5nm is likely to be late, and I don't think anyone really knows what happens after that. Longer term, industrial manufacture is probably going to have to move…

... and why would we invest the money to do that when there is not enough (software-driven) demand for that performance. The average person uses PCs and mobile devices to browse the web, write documents, order an Uber, and maybe play games. Nothing much is being done on the software front that challenges current systems. Maybe if VR took off or we got home applications for AI like domestic robotics that would change.…

I agree that most of the demand requires software innovation , but there are other good sources of demand, for example:

1. AI - variety of applications, both for consumer and business markets.

2. Telepresence. If we can get the real feeling of "being there" to telepresence, at a price point that's attractive for the consumer.

3. Simulation. Currently it's a complex process ,mostly done by experts. If it can be a tool for regular engineers , and maybe further down the road - for combining that with some sort of genetic-algorithms , maybe there's potential for a huge demand increase.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#119

Post by ars »

timboslice wrote: post #72
minthd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue: currently the biggest bottleneck , cost wise, is in lithography - the process we use to draw the transistors into chips. Because of this issue, the two latest generations of chips are more expensive(per transistor) than an older version - stopping moore's law. And moore's law probably won't return to life, until we learn how to solve that problem, which the current work doesn't help with.

This is where 450mm wafers and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) were supposed to come in. EUV relieves the need for double patterning and the tremendous additional costs that entails (and was used to manufacture this 7nm chip). The CEO of Applied Materials, Gary Dickerson, has stated that the 450mm wafer timeline “has definitely been pushed out from a timing standpoint.” That’s incredibly important, because the…

> and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) were supposed to come in

I wonder if they could use electrons instead of light to etch the surface.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#120

Post by DiabloD3 »

moonchrome wrote: post #94
oldmanjay wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're incorrect and remembering performance that never existed based on shortcomings you glossed over at the time because you have that all too human bias of believing that things were better when you were younger.

There is so many low hanging fruit in software design that is simply there because of legacy design trade-offs and the cost associated with replacing those - we could gain huge performance gains over night if we for eg. eliminated reliance on hardware memory protection and context switching from kernel space to user space by using languages that can prove memory safety in software. Then imagine how much performance y…

I wish Linux would just merge a ZFS implementation into the kernel already.

I also wish ZFS would grow an encryption layer (one that isn't based on Sunacle's implementation, since Sunacle doesn't want to share that one thus no one can use it).

Post reply on HN